Meet Your Neighbor: Steve Shelley

For a city with less than 40,000 residents, there sure are a lot of famous people living in Hoboken. From Gov. Jon Corzine to Giants quarterback Eli Manning to comedian Artie Lange, you never know who you're going to run into coming out of Carlo's Bakery.

Here's another name to add to the list: Steve Shelley, drummer for legendary alternative rock band Sonic Youth. Shelley also is the founder of indie label Smells Like Records.

Shelley -- who turns 44 on Saturday -- was born in Michigan but now lives somewhere in the Mile Square City; Smells Like Records, which he founded in 1992, also is based here.

Shelley joined Sonic Youth in 1985, four years after it was founded. He replaced Bob Bert, who in turn was a replacement for the original drummer, Richard Edson.

At the time, Shelley was the 22-year-old drummer for a punk band with an unprintable name. The story goes that the other members of Sonic Youth saw him playing live and were so impressed they hired him without an audition.

According to an interview with music/art magazine Kitty Magik, Shelley runs Smells Like Records out of his Hoboken home. He was asked how he structures his daily life:

No, there's no structure. I don't know. I work in my home office for a while and when I get bored I mail records and answer e-mail; it's all quite boring. It's become a one-man operation so I just do everything myself. I've had employees but I kind of turned it back into a hobby because it was starting to feel like a job. And I do that for a while and I get bored with being at home so I go into the city and get into trouble somewhere and hopefully come here [Sonic Youth's studio in Manhattan] if something is going on. I much prefer to be traveling.

Shelley gave Hoboken a better shout-out in a recent interview with the St. Petersburg Times. And we don't mean Florida. This week, Sonic Youth played in Russia -- as they had 18 years before, when it was still the Soviet Union. Tonight they continue their European tour in Munich.

Last week, before Monday's performance at Manezh Kadetskogo Korpusa, Shelley spoke to the St. Petersburg Times "by phone from his home in Hoboken, New Jersey."

Speaking about the current music scene in New York City and various clubs in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Shelley was asked: "Which is the single most important place?"

Important... I don't know. Here, where I live, there's still Maxwell's, which has been here since the late 1970s or early 1980s, and everyone has played there, from Nirvana to REM to Sonic Youth, you know, everybody through the days has played there.